Editorial
The Gist
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Digital overload grows. Healthcare systems are overwhelmed by the volume and complexity of digital records, from telehealth to billing to imaging.
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Composable systems scale. Hybrid and modular tech stacks ease digital strain and improve innovation through AI tools and better data integration.
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Interoperability matters more. Tech that works together improves patient care and reduces burnout for staff.
Make no mistake, managing digital medical records is a huge pain point for healthcare companies today. Hospitals and healthcare systems are inundated with digital medical records. Healthcare providers receive new patient records daily, manage insurance claims, send electronic prescriptions to pharmacies, schedule appointment changes and manage a constant stream of patient health updates. Add in operating telehealth appointments and handling digital imaging records, and the digital traffic and strain on healthcare companies can be dizzying.
But the reality is that patients don’t care. In fact, they’re expecting in-depth personalized service. They desire an understanding of how treatments impact their whole body and personal history, as opposed to a one-size-fits-all approach. For example, a study by CVS found that eight in 10 surveyed consumers believe personalized care to be important.
To reach this level of support, health systems require a healthy digital ecosystem and a company culture that buys into how technology serves the needs of all patients. Speed and personalized treatments are modern challenges that health companies operating on a monolithic or legacy-based digital architecture might struggle to meet. And if the company itself isn’t buying into how technology can support patient needs, meeting patient needs will be impossible.
Table of Contents
Making Patient Data Systems Work Together
Crafting and executing more efficient business solutions will also be difficult without a more modern, composable approach. Organizations may miss out on taking advantage of agentic AI and generative AI tools that assist doctors with personalized treatments and faster reporting.
The Case for Composable and Hybrid Frameworks
From a more technical point of view, tech stacks that follow a hybrid, composable framework and that prioritize APIs and microservices can help get disparate systems more in sync. Implementing a composable or hybrid approach allows health organizations to run more modern, sustainable digital ecosystems.
A legacy framework will likely have patient records, imaging, billing and more, all of which run in silos. A major advantage of the hybrid or composable framework is freeing up an IT leader at a health system to find different tools and solutions that all integrate. They ultimately pull together patient information and send unified data sources to one streamlined location.
Driving Interoperability and Innovation in Health IT
From there, composability can enhance the digital ecosystem in many ways. For one, it provides a basis for innovation. AI is reshaping how health systems operate, and a composable structure can support innovation such as powering agentic AI and generative AI solutions to analyze a patient’s history, recommend treatments based on personalized records and help produce reports or manage medication information. Data that’s unified, cleaned and enriched supports a company’s ability to add new tools and solutions.
Composability also enhances how a company’s technologies work together. Embracing a composable or hybrid model urges health companies to have technology that is more interoperable, resulting in better consumer experiences. For example, APIs allow a smoother data exchange of digital health records between systems, whether it’s a hospital sharing a digital record with another hospital or a health system integrating with a patient’s fitness tracker to provide real-time health data to clinicians. This interoperability can offer a new level of personalized patient care and simplify the digital traffic between systems and solutions.
Reducing Risk and Boosting Resilience With Composability
Finally, composability helps keep digital systems up and running. Maintenance of technology can be costly. Purely monolithic systems are prone to having a full-system breakdown if a problem arises somewhere in the platform. Hospitals and their patients cannot afford to have these shutdowns. For example, one problem within a content management system can halt operations throughout the legacy system, as they’re all tied so closely together. A microservices approach helps to isolate specific components, keep technical troubles contained and keep systems up and running. Composable, hybrid systems also reduce vendor lock-in by allowing hospitals to swap out underperforming components, which helps save costs on licensing and maintenance.
There are more ways a composable approach can better support the business goals of health organizations and their patients, but the key is managing patient data, improving telehealth care, integrating internal and external services, and assisting hospitals with regulatory compliance.
Related Article: The Composable Mindset: It’s Not About the Technology
How Composability Solves Healthcare IT Challenges
This table outlines common digital pain points in healthcare and how a composable or hybrid technology approach helps resolve them—ultimately improving patient outcomes, reducing burnout, and supporting innovation.
| Challenge | Composable Solution | Impact |
|---|---|---|
| Digital overload from records, imaging, and telehealth | Hybrid, modular tech stacks reduce system strain | Improves performance and innovation potential |
| Fragmented legacy systems | Composable architecture integrates siloed data | Creates unified patient records and streamlines workflows |
| Lack of real-time, personalized care capabilities | Agentic and generative AI powered by clean, connected data | Enables personalized treatments and faster reporting |
| Low system interoperability | API-driven composable systems enhance data exchange | Boosts patient care quality and staff collaboration |
| System-wide failures in monolithic tech stacks | Microservices isolate issues and maintain uptime | Minimizes disruptions and improves system resilience |
| High vendor lock-in and maintenance costs | Composable models support flexible component swapping | Lowers licensing costs and reduces dependency risks |
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What Happens When Systems Work
Health systems lean heavily on their digital operations, including the doctors, nurses and staff all working closely with digital records and telehealth programs. Ultimately, smoother workflows, interoperable systems and modular, scalable digital frameworks help alleviate tech strain and help reduce staff burnout.
As hospitals seek innovations such as agentic AI to automate patient schedules and generative AI to analyze medical scans, a modern, composable tech architecture is foundational. Health systems can ease the pressure that current digital ecosystems feel by incorporating a modular, composable or hybrid tech stack. A healthy digital platform could mean healthier patients and happier doctors and staff.
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